The business world is adopting an on-demand model, and for a very good reason: the business environment is changing faster and becoming more unpredictable. That leaves us with a choice to incorporate the change in our core business or spend money, time and effort in exploring the past trends. How many times has it happened in the past? We made our cost benefit analysis, the savings looked terrific, the solution got implemented, and life was happy go lucky. Then the reorganization happened, the planning went out of window, and now we’re saddled into an IT infrastructure system that doesn’t fit the new situation we are in now. That’s business today. Even the list of things that are changing is changing. What we need is a solution that’s designed for change. What we need is an on-demand business model. We need to be able to change with a change in the IT infrastructure system. And if, the IT infrastructure is an important part of your bus...

Having survived Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) projects, enterprises are looking for fresh ways to accelerate business and to increase efficiency and agility. Web services, a set of technologies that automate business processes,promise the speed and agility that enterprises seek to create a competitive edge. Unlike previous technological innovations that required re-engineering work or hands-on intervention from end users in order to effect changes, Web services are layered onto existing applications and are themselves self-adapting, capable of discovering and querying one another automatically, and able to connect, compare, assess, re-configure, and transact as quickly as business needs demand. The result is an unprecedented degree of automation, efficiency, and agility. Constellations of business connections and trading networks can appear overnight as Web services automatically pursue opportunities that even the most diligent h...

Today, most sizable IT organizations have hundreds, if not thousands, of licenses for software tools that are critical for building and running the databases and applications that power their business. Managing these tools and their associated licenses, including deploying, provisioning, and updating them, is time-consuming and incurs many hidden costs. There are also real productivity costs when IT professionals can’t readily access the tools they need at the right time. On the other hand, putting a bunch of tools on a server with no management, provisioning or usage tracking capabilities around them can come at an even higher cost. So then, where should IT professionals or anyone else responsible for setting up and managing a tools infrastructure look for answers? The latest phenomenon sweeping the IT landscape – cloud computing – may hold the most promise to overcome this issue. The reduced complexity, lower costs and improved scalability afforded by enterprise clouds ar...